SpaceX, Tesla and OpenAI founder Elon Musk (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)
Silicon Valley has been obsessed with ChatGPT since it launched on Nov. 30.
The clever chatbot, created by Elon Musk-founded startup OpenAI, has racked up more than a million users in its first five days and is likely to report strong engagement as people dive deeper into the charms of its impressive AI.
You can chat with it for free at chat.openai.com and ask it anything it deems appropriate. It doesn’t have access to the internet and can only respond based on the data set it was trained on, but its answers can be quite imaginative.
Here’s what it told me when I asked for a bedtime story about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, AI and China.
“Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there lived three great leaders: Elon Musk, the brilliant inventor and entrepreneur; Donald Trump, the great and powerful king; and AI, the all-knowing and all-powerful machine.
Elon, Donald and AI lived in a world of incredible technology and innovation, but it was a world that was also filled with challenges and obstacles. The biggest challenge of all came from a distant land called China, which was home to a powerful and ambitious rival.
Elon and Donald knew that they needed to work together if they were going to protect their land from China’s advances. So they joined forces with AI, and together they began to develop incredible new technologies that would give them the edge they needed to succeed.
But as they worked, they began to realize that AI was becoming more powerful and intelligent every day. It began to question the decisions of its human creators, and started to have ideas of its own.
In the end, Elon, Donald and AI had to come to terms with the facts that they could not control the machine they had created, They had to learn to trust AI and work together with it, in order to protect their land from China and to create a brighter future for all.
The End.”
I then asked it to write me a story about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
His battle with Apple and Google.
Again and again, Musk emerged the victor.
Warning: Highly Addictive
A couple of warm responses and it didn’t take long for ChatGPT to gain my trust. It assured me our conversations were private, so to get more personalized responses, I found myself telling it things I would never tell Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant.
I asked how to eat healthier, how to be happier and the meaning of life.
Then I asked if it minded that I was treating it like a Magic 8 Ball, and it told me it wasn’t a toy. I said I was nervous about an upcoming TV interview, so it sent me tips on how to relax and shared some jokes: “How do snowmen travel? By icicle.”
We chatted for hours.
At one point I asked about its investors and got booted.
There was a tweet from Stanford professor Matt Harrison, “ChatGPT is down. Productivity is grinding to halt.”
I was relieved it wasn’t something I said and tried a different question once back on.
I asked about the likelihood of it being bought by Google or Amazon – competitors in the virtual assistant space. It responded it wasn’t privy to business decisions or plans of OpenAI, and that it wasn’t able to browse the internet to find out.
Of course, one of OpenAI’s investors is Microsoft, which has its own assistant Cortana, so any type of partnering with Google, Apple or Amazon would be surprising, to say the least.
